My wife kisses your hands, I your feet, offering you my kitchenmaid, four children, and the Burra, and anything else.
Valencia, Saturday, 24 Sept. [1831].
Dear Addington,
We arrived here yesterday, having ridden from Granada to Alicante, and thence to Xativa, a most magnificent mountain ride, full of old towns, perched on rocks, and sheltered by ruined castles, narrow defiles, precipices and torrents. The accommodation and roads infinitely better than we had been led to expect, so that my wife, riding on the foal of an ass, arrived at Alicante hardly fatigued.
San Philipe de Xativa is one of the most picturesque towns in Spain, not even excepting Granada. The famous country about Valencia may be very fertile, and rich, and extremely agreeable to the eye of the proprietor, but very little so to the traveller, as the mulberry and olive trees on each side of the road, in so flat a country, completely intercept the view.
I see in the papers that you have had to interfere for some English artist, who was taken up for sketching the Palace at Madrid, which you will probably have to do some day for me, as I was nearly taken to the Alcalde for drawing some palm trees at Elche; but, on telling the officer that he and the Alcalde might go to Carrajo, and refusing to go, the thing passed off; to be sure, I had six of the Alhambra invalids with me, and might have ordered them to bring the Alcalde to me, which would have been the best way after all. I shall remain here four or five days, and thence proceed to Barcelona and Zaragoça, to either of which places, if any crumbs of comfort fall from your table in the way of Galignani, they may be addressed, at all events to the latter place, Zaragoça.
I left Dionysia in great force, and Don José much delighted at the honour of your Excellency’s visit. The Captain-General wrote me two notes after you were gone, one addressed to me as Gentilhombre de S. M. Britanica and the second to Lord Ricardo Fort. There is no saying what I might not have come to be had I remained there a few days longer.
Valencia seems to be a nice place; the women as pretty here as the Granadinas are ugly.
Ever most truly yours,
Richard Ford.
Valencia, Wed., 28th [Sept. 1831].